


That Hardest Part

by der_tanzer



Category: The Losers (2010)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-01-26
Updated: 2011-01-26
Packaged: 2017-10-15 02:29:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,058
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/156099
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/der_tanzer/pseuds/der_tanzer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cougar knows how to wait, but that doesn't mean he always likes it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	That Hardest Part

Cougar was trained to wait. From the time he was a child, hiding in closets and under beds to escape the family violence that formed his earliest memories, he had taught himself to wait. To be still and silent, watch for the opportunity to run or shoot—whatever the situation called for. And as he grew older, the latter had become more common that the former. Cougar didn’t have to run as much, but he did still have to wait.

He’d been waiting on a mountainside in Brazil, his sight on Jensen and Roque as they pretended to negotiate a hostage exchange that was never going to happen. They didn’t have any hostages, and just as soon as Jensen got out of the way, there wouldn’t be anyone to negotiate with. He only had to take down two men. Then Clay and Pooch would storm the camp with guns blazing, clear the rest of the hostiles, and gather up the kidnapped general and whatever remained of his entourage. It was a very simple operation for the silent man who knew how to wait.

Jensen finally stopped talking and stepped to the left. Roque moved to the right, and just like that, his shot was clear. He popped both targets less than a second apart and was breaking down his tripod before the bodies hit the ground. Two hours’ wait for one second’s work. It was the most satisfying thing he knew how to do.

***

The team had the general and two staff members in their truck, all that was left of the ten men who’d been taken from the American embassy three days ago. They made it to the rendezvous point in good time and there they sat, listening to the complaints of a hungry general and a staff sergeant who was spitting blood.

“Why aren’t you getting us the hell out of here?” asked the translator, who had survived only because the guerrillas found him useful. He probably could have gotten a full time position with them once the general was dead, but rescue was good, too.

“We’re waitin’ on our man,” Clay said shortly.

Jensen said nothing, just sat in the back and pecked away at his laptop like it wasn’t his best friend who’d somehow failed to show. He knew the route and the terrain, so he knew that Cougar should have been the first one here. The man who had waiting down to a science should have been doing it under that tree over there while the rest of them fought for their lives.

“What’ve you got?” Clay asked, somehow knowing the precise moment Jensen had something to share.

“His radio’s down, but I have his transponder. He’s about two hundred yards up that mountainside, a hundred yards below the nest. He’s not moving, Colonel.”

“You think they got him coming down?” Pooch asked. “They couldn’t get Cougs, right? If they had somebody lined up, we’d’ve seen ‘em.”

“Probably,” Clay agreed. “We’ve got maybe ten minutes to get to our extraction point. You all know the rules on this and you know I can’t order anyone to—”

“I’ll get him,” Jensen said, attaching a device to his belt that was already programmed to home in on Cougar’s transponder.

“Give us a signal when you’re secure, and we’ll fly over and pick you up if it’s still clear.”

“If it’s still clear?” Roque repeated. “Man, that’s bullshit. If we can’t at least get Jensen back, why’re you sending him out there?”

“Time’s wasting,” Jensen said, hopping out of the truck. “Hammer down, Pooch. We’ll catch you on the flip side.” He tucked his computer into his bag, pulled his rifle free of its shoulder harness, and took off at a jog for the base of the slope where Cougar lay waiting.

***

“Shit, Cougs, what’re you doing?” was the first thing he said when he found his friend. The sniper was lying on his back, face up, head pointed down the mountain. There was a lot of disturbed ground, displaced rock and trampled dirt, and in the middle of it all one slight Mexican with a rope noose around his ankle and a leather hat lodged firmly on his head. A knife lay on the ground a few feet away, and though Jensen was smart and usually good at figuring things out, this one was beyond him.

“Waiting,” Cougar said, which was accurate, but not informative.

“What the hell happened?” Jensen asked, kneeling down by his head.

“Booby trap. The rope caught my foot, and dislodged that boulder,” he jerked his head in the general direction of _down there_. Jensen figured getting run over by a giant rock explained the dirt ground into his clothes, and he must have thrown the knife to cut the rope. That was a pretty move, even if it didn’t accomplish much by way of salvation.

“How bad? Can you get up?”

Cougar cocked his head and raised one eyebrow, plainly asking if he’d still be lying here if he could.

“Yeah, dumb question. Okay, can _I_ get you up? Are there any internal injuries I should be worried about?”

Again with the eyebrow. Jensen wasn’t having one of his better days here. But then neither was Cougar.

“I just don’t want to hurt you, dude.”

“There’s nothing broken that will get better by staying here. Tell me the plan.”

“The plan is, we get our asses to that clearing above the nest and wait for the bird to pick us up.”

Cougar closed his eyes briefly, his expressive face momentarily wiped clean of all thoughts and words. Then he nodded and used bleeding elbows to push himself up onto shredded hands. His face wasn’t blank now. It was screaming with pain, his eyes shrieking so loudly Jensen almost covered his ears.

“Is it your back or your legs? I need to know how to lift you.”

“Legs,” he whispered, his voice almost inaudible under the wailing eyes. “And pelvis, I think.”

Jensen scrambled up the slope a few feet and steadied Cougar with a hand on his back. With one hand, he carefully explored the sinewy legs and narrow hips, feeling bones move everywhere he touched. There was apt to be all kinds of internal bleeding, but he knew that broken pelvises were the worst. If the artery was nicked it could be held together by his position on the ground. Picking him up could start the blood flowing and kill him before the bird arrived. But staying here wasn’t going to save him either.

“All right, I got you,” Jensen said confidently, triggering his radio signal for the team. “You just hang on and we’ll be out of here in a minute.”

Cougar jerked his head toward the knife that lay just beyond his feet and muttered one word. “Roque’s.”

“Like he doesn’t have enough. Okay, I’ll get it. Can I let go?”

He got a small nod in reply and scrambled after the knife, tucking it away in his belt. He shouldered Cougar’s rifle opposite his own for balance, then crouched and lifted his friend in both arms, cradling him to his chest as he ran. With a different kind of injury, Jensen would have slung him over his shoulder and carried one of the guns, but Cougar couldn’t take being balanced on his broken pelvis. He was lucky in a way, because with any other man, Jensen would have had to do it anyway. Only Cougar was small enough in both height and weight to give him a choice.

It hurt him—his soft groans and sighs said so as plainly as his shrieking expression—but he could bear it. He kept his arms tight around Jensen’s neck, trying not to slide because it was agonizing every time Jensen stopped to hitch him back up, and watched their back-trail as best he could. Once he let go with his left hand, pulled his pistol from his belt, and switched it to his right hand behind Jensen’s head. A second later there was a deafening shot, through which Jensen barely heard the sound of a body tumbling through the brush. Guerillas were everywhere, it seemed, and they might be intercepted yet.

They reached the sniper’s nest where Cougar had lain in wait for his target, and the clearing was just ahead. Jensen hitched the shattered body up on his chest one last time and ran faster as the chopper loomed up on the horizon. Cougar fired another shot and a man fell screaming from the mountainside. Then he shoved the pistol into Jensen’s computer bag so he could hold onto his hat as the rotor wash hit them.

There wasn’t room to land the bird, but a harness dropped from its belly and Jensen knelt to strap Cougar into it. He fastened the buckles in record time, grabbed the rope with one hand, and wrapped his other arm around Cougar’s body to stabilize him. The chopper lifted at the same time the winch started, and this time Cougar shrieked aloud, long and rending, as he had been waiting to do since he first felt the noose tighten around his leg.

***

That was five days ago. Now he was lying in bed in a military hospital, waiting again. Waiting to heal, waiting for release, waiting for something good to come on TV. Waiting for Jensen to waste the hours with his idle chatter. There had been times when the talking got on his nerves, but now he couldn’t remember why. He liked having someone ( _Jensen_ ) to distract him from his pain and fear, and make the days go by faster. Jensen never talked about the things that scared Cougar, like whether he’d be able to walk straight or run fast again, the possibility that he would be permanently crippled and lose his place on the team. Jensen only talked about what they’d do when Cougar got back—the practical jokes he had lined up, the money he intended to win back from Roque when they could play five hand poker again (because it was being a hand short that was screwing him up, he was sure of it), and how much Cougar was going to like the way he’d redecorated the room they shared.

And the whole time he talked, Cougar just lay there and listened. His expression shifted constantly from interested to unconscious and everything in between, but he hardly ever spoke.

The days blurred into weeks and other members of the team visited often, but Jensen was his constant, the one who was there when he opened his eyes and still there when he closed them again. Always talking, sharing stories, making sure Cougar knew he was a part of things and always would be. One day Cougar woke to find Jensen holding his hand, and a few days later he was disturbed in the night by a muffled choking sound and opened his eyes to see the strong shoulders he had clung to on the mountain shaking with barely suppressed sobs. That time he reached out his hand and Jensen took it, laughing now, though his fingers were wet with tears.

“Cougar,” he whispered, still laughing and crying, squeezing the scarred hand as hard as he could, “you just have to get out of here, man. I don’t care if your legs are broken and your pelvis is held together with chicken wire—we need you. I’ll carry you on my back if I have to, like Chewy and C-3PO, only you’d have a gun so you could totally cover me. It’d be awesome, like having eyes in the back of my head. Or something. Whatever. But not this. This is no good.”

“I know,” Cougar said softly, drawing him closer and brushing his tears away. “It won’t be much longer, I promise.”

“Really? You know that for sure?”

“The doctor said a couple of days. Physical therapy and no training, but I can sleep in my own bed at night.”

“How in the hell did you wrangle that?”

He smiled in the dim light, that cocksure grin Jensen loved so much, and twitched his eyebrows as if to say he could do anything.

“Cougar, come on. What’d you do?”

“I didn’t do anything, _mi amigo_. I just told them that this time, I couldn’t wait.”


End file.
